NOTES for Mar 7:24-30
The story of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter sometimes strikes the reader by the apparent harshness of the Savior's words addressed to the healed girl's mother. The comparison with a dog, unworthy of attention, really looks at least excessively harsh. Meanwhile, the woman's own reaction to this seeming harshness is quite calm.
Traditional exegesis explains what happens by the woman's deep repentance, her readiness to acknowledge any sin in herself if such acknowledgment will help her daughter. On closer examination, however, the dialogue between Jesus and the woman who turned to Him with a request for her daughter's healing resembles a parable more than anything else, a parable the woman understands and in whose language she answers the Savior. It may also be noted that the image of a dog as a symbol of uncleanness occurs in the Gospel text fairly often. This is not surprising: the Torah really does include the dog, like the pig, among unclean animals, and among all such animals these two were the ones Jesus' interlocutors and listeners most often saw.
Then Jesus' question takes on a definite meaning: does the clean person have the right to the Kingdom, while the unclean person, for example the same Gentile, does not? And the Syrophoenician woman was undoubtedly a Gentile. Can someone who has never known either purity or sanctification share in the Kingdom opened to the children of God, and all who belonged to the people of God were such children? And the woman, understanding the Savior perfectly, speaks of the crumbs that fall from the table. In essence, she accepts both Jesus Himself and the Kingdom He brought into the world. She accepts it while understanding that she herself has no right at all to this Kingdom that has come into the world. But she does not claim much either. She asks only for the smallest thing; the faintest reflection of the Kingdom's light is enough for her, enough for her daughter's healing. And she receives what she asks, receives it as an undeserved gift that she could not have expected in any way.
Thus the question of the people of God and the Gentiles is resolved in relation to the Kingdom. The one who asserts his rights to this Kingdom will have to prove the rights he has asserted; he will have to correspond to what he has claimed. But to the one who claims nothing, understanding that he has no rights to anything, the Kingdom will be given freely, on one condition: his humility must be genuine. It can only be, to use philosophical language, an existential choice for the one asking, and not at all a tribute to politeness, even religious politeness. Thus the Kingdom reconciles all: both those who feel their own strength and those who feel weak and unworthy of what they seek. It reconciles them by the love that both the strong and the weak need equally.